As the logic of evolution comes to a head in the middle of the Nineteenth-Century, an older Frenchman, haunted by an odd event in his youth, tracks the journey of a strange stone object westward to a pre-Civil-War America where he and his cousin, a young scientist, and a strong-willed woman they meet under trying circumstances, match wits with a wealthy European entrepreneur to try to prevent, if they can, the possible loss of one world and the uncertain birth of another.
William Barnwell is the author of nine novels. He was born in Macon, Georgia, spent two years in Oregon, and grew up in North Alabama on the Tennessee River. As a kid, he read lots of stuff on the weekend, often under a blanket with a flashlight. Early on, he won prizes in creative writing. He attended undergraduate school in Memphis, Tennessee, working with Jack Farris at Rhodes College and later teaching with Harry Crews at the University of Florida.
His first academic job was at the University of South Carolina. When his first novel, The Blessing Papers, was released in England in 1980, he became visiting writer-in-residence at Columbia College, a private all-girls school in Columbia, SC.
Barnwell has also published a number of articles and reviews in academic journals about William Yeats and an Irish novelist, Francis Stuart, as well as poems and short stories. He has delivered many papers on popular culture and technology. He was the Director of the regional 1984 Conference on the Humanities and Technology in the South. Leslie Fiedler spoke on George Orwell's famous novel 1984, and Alvin Toffler made predictions on the future. The outcome of such a binary conference was clear: Technology won.
Simon & Schuster bought the paperback rights of The Blessing Papers and contracted Barnwell for three more in a science-fantasy series that was well received. His fifth novel, The Scheme-of-the-Month Club, was reviewed as being a comic romp in South Carolina similar to what Carl Hiaasen does in Florida.
His sixth novel, The Dungeon Below Bling-Bling High, is a YA novel of failure mired in the mud of federal regulations that demanded by decree that "excellence" and "high expectations" would rise yearly with only a hint to most students about what that might mean. Demands were always rising, but the students felt that they, as students, were always falling. This did not make for fertile learning ground. In addition, a fear of something horrible lurking somewhere in the school's basement was pervasive, but denied, until a fateful decision was made.
His seventh novel, American Heat, involves the WWI desert legend Lawrence of Arabia, reincarnated as a hardcore villain in our time and an idiot savant of killing. What can the hero do when all the oil in the entire Arabian Peninsula is close to being blown up, and Lawrence of Arabia is after him to stop him?
Barnwell is a member of the Authors Guild and the International Thriller Writers group (ITW). He is currently working on his ninth novel, a PI thriller, Off Base, as well as serializing his eighth novel in eBook form, a science-fantasy novel he had started years before entitled, I, Lord Several. A portion of this novel will also be posted at his website: williambarnwell.net.
More about all of his work can also be found at that website.
